StarkWare joins Israeli unicorn club with $50 million Series C at $2 billion valuation

The Netanya-based company has developed a cryptographic solution it believes can solve the problems of scalability and privacy hampering blockchain technology

Israeli startup StarkWare, which develops solutions for blockchain technology, announced on Tuesday that it has secured $50 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $2 billion.

 

The Series C funding comes just seven months after a $75 million Series B round.

StarkWare co-founders (from right), Michael Riabzev (Chief Architect), Uri Kolodny (CEO), Alessandro Chiesa and Eli Ben-Sasson (President). Photo: Eyal Tuag

 

"Blockchains today simply can't handle the volume of transactions required for mass use," said Eli Ben-Sasson, Co-founder and President at StarkWare. "The math-based technology invented by StarkWare is the invisible hand that increases blockchain's bandwidth, giving it the capacity to serve everyone."

 

"This valuation makes us more confident than ever in our vision. By empowering blockchains to scale globally, people of any economic status will gradually be able to stop entrusting data into the hands of big companies, and control it themselves instead."

 

StarkWare has instituted a new highly-efficient method for blockchain-based computation, which is used by some of the leading platforms and applications around the world. They include dYdX, Sorare, and Immutable X.

 

"StarkWare is attacking one of the most important problems in crypto – the computational scalability of the blockchain," said Mike Vernal, partner at Sequoia. "StarkWare is the clear market leader in terms of zero-knowledge roll-ups, powering over $100 billion in transaction volume just last month and helping dYdX, Sorare, Immutable and others to serve millions of customers. We are thrilled to deepen our relationship with the team behind such a foundational technology."

Related articles:

• Israeli blockchain startup StarkWare raises $75 million series B
• The Bitcoin bull is raging and StarkWare aims to ensure blockchain follows suit
• “If blockchain will wait for banks, it will have to wait for many years”

 

Until now, StarkWare's technology has been available only to clients through its scaling engine StarkEx. But on the back of the Series C, the company is planning the full deployment of the StarkNet platform, which will let anyone build blockchain apps using StarkWare's ground-breaking technology.

 

"Congested blockchains and high transaction fees are the biggest impediment to building mass-scale crypto apps for all, to meet the everyday needs of the general population," said Uri Kolodny, Co-founder and CEO at StarkWare. "StarkNet will change this. It will lead to a blockchain building boom that will make blockchain apps as much a part of our everyday lives as smartphone apps."